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Fourth Estate
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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2014
Text © Rod Liddle 2014
Rod Liddle asserts his moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
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Cover photograph © Frantzesco Kangaris / eyevine
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Source ISBN 9780007351275
Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007351305
Version 2015-03-10
For Alicia
… remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Contents
7 Grand Theft Auto versus Boredom
8 And All Women Agree With Me About This
13 Cloistered Elites 5, the North 0
15 Hairs, HAIRS, Growing Out of Your Spinal Column …
16 The Muon and the Elephant in Your Sitting Room
17 Deutsch–Amerikanische Freundschaft
1
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back.
Philip Larkin
I got an aeroplane for Christmas when I was six years old. Not a real one, but a heavy tinplate thing with chunky red flashing plastic lights on the wings and some sort of noise box which made a sound like one of those heaving 1950s vacuum cleaners, a piercing shriek like it was undergoing a hysterectomy without anaesthetic. I’d seen it in, I think, the toy department of Selfridges in Oxford Street on the annual trip to town where I got to visit Santa’s grotto and choose my present for the year. I can remember right now standing by the counter piled up with all these unimagined and beguiling toys and seeing the aeroplane up on top, lights flashing, screaming away – a big BOAC passenger liner – and being utterly, if momentarily, captivated by it.
‘Why would you want a plane?’ my mum asked with a sort of perplexed distaste as we stood there. None of us had ever been on one, nor were likely to. Aside from the unimaginable cost and the fear of flying, my family didn’t really hold with abroad on account of it being too hot and full of wogs. My dad had been abroad only once, briefly, to shell bits of Belgium during those interminable, drawn-out final stages of the Second World War. I still have a replica of the MTB he served on, carved with rough approximation to detail out of the brass casing of a German shell which had hit his boat but – mercifully, for my dad and by extension me – not detonated. They shelled Belgium after it had been liberated, according to my dad,